So last weekend we kicked off a new sermon series. I didn’t have locked down sermon gfx but I had a design brief of introducing the end times but not scary graphics wise I knew they were going with a heros kind of look.

I really liked what Ken Wilson had done at NewSpring. But I felt it didn’t meet my “not scary” criteria in the brief. It doesn’t fit our culture either.

I found this template but didn’t want to drop the money. I know it was done with Trapcode Form which I have but couldn’t figure out how to wrap the particle system in 3D space like a ribbon.

Well I was running out of time and settled on this video. It’s just a slightly tweaked version of a tutorial Andrew Kramer did for his Twitch plugin. The sound FX came with twitch and the track is from Sigur Ros.

I know it’s a tutorial based project but I’m really happy with how it came out. I think it really hit the balance of the intensity a series on the end times has but without being disturbing or scary. Even though I personally really dig the piece Ken’s team put together.

So right now I like theming the visuals (graphics & lights) to match the sermon graphics. I posted last week showing the sermon bumper and mentioned the loops I made. Well here they are:

If you checked out my last set of loops for the previous series you’ll see a common animation technique: wiggle loop from Dan Ebbert. I need to learn some new techniques for animating the artwork I get for sermon graphics.

I work in a paradoxical job. In some areas I get a ton of creative freedom. In other areas I get very little. I don’t get wiggle room when it comes to the package/ name/ theme for the sermon graphics. But I get complete freedom with the design of the graphics package for sermon series, videos and other promotional pieces.

Last weekend we threw it back to the 80s with a message wrapped around Top Gun, “Everyone Needs a Wingman”. It was a great message about the need we all have for community. I always struggle when a sermon series is based on a movie or TV show. I don’t want to just rip it off but at the same time how much can you change before you loose the cultural tie in? It’s a balance that I tend to lean towards imitating the style of the original.

This isn’t one of the graphics I’m proud of. It’s a logo on some stock footage. Design at it’s basic form. But it worked for the weekend.

Here’s the last intro video for our series on Stress and Strain of Life. Just like before the graphics were treated in Photoshop and animated in After Effects. I know the video is not perfect. I created it while I was running sound for our North Texas Leadership Conference on Thursday and Friday. During the sessions I’d be working on my MacBookPro.

I know some of the titles are up there for too long. That is one area I need to improve on. How long should text be on the screen? I typically read the text then add a little more to take into account for the font and distance from the screen. Does anyone have any other rules of thumb for how long text should be on screen?

The video was scripted out by my senior pastor. I would really like to get a creative team together. I think technically our videos have been pretty good but I think the content is where we are hurting now.

Here’s the intro video for this week. It’s shorter than the following weeks will be. We have some other footage to mix in. But I’m pleased with how the media for this week have turned out. I created the graphics, a worship background and an intro video that all have the same style and feel.

The graphics were treated in photoshop and then everything was animated in After Effects. I scored the sound in SoundTrackPro.

Man I hate long sermon titles. I like short descriptive titles that paint a word picture or play of a metaphor or analogy. But that would be too easy. So now that our last sermon series wrapped up it’s time to kick off a new series. I started off with a foundation from Kyle Key at Creativemyk.com. I used Grunge Serifa as my font. I ran the graphics through Illustrator’s LiveTrace feature, then stylized them in photoshop. The waterbrush in the background is from BittBox.com. That’s the what I did. Here’s how it came out:

It seems I’m starting to get this request from my pastor more and more. He gives me a list of facts or wants a topical background on a subject then tells me to make a video.

Like the Mind Games intro video we did last fall:

Well last weekend we started a series called GPS: God’s Positioning System. I was asked to give a brief history of how GPS was unveiled, how it works and then something to engage the audience. And I was given the movie Enemy of the State as a visual reference.

So I thought about a way to tell this story. The route I came up was a computer interface to tell the story. So the video is an overview of a computer screen and jumps to sections to break it up and bring focus.

I should have started at my close up dimensions and work backwards, but I didn’t. I wanted my close ups to fill the screen with out cropping but the don’t. I feel the style was very similar to the mind games video. Any ideas on how I could have done it better?

And I know this copy has 2 typos in it. Caught one after Sat service. Didn’t catch the other one until Monday. My wife usually proofs all my content but this one came down to the wire.